Scrap Yards Yield Raw Material for Artist’s Amazing Ray Guns

Artist Clayton Bailey and his mustache at his home in Port Costa, California. Bailey's hand-assembled pop guns, which begin as scraps from metal yards, can fire corks, potatoes or peas up to 100 feet.

Cork-shooter made from a hopper gun.

Bailey's yard is both storage and an informal museum of his works, including much of his ceramic art.

Cork-shooter made from a drill and a two-cycle engine, with walnut wood.

Bailey and his wife, Betty, prepare dinner together.

Cork-shooter made from a vintage drill and walnut wood.

Bailey works on a pop gun in his studio.

Cork-shooter made from a plumber's tool and door knobs.

Bailey's studio brims with spare parts, nuts, bolts, tools and raw metal -- treasures gleaned from several decades' worth of trolling scrap yards. Here, some unused pieces are home to a pair of false teeth.

Pea-shooter made from a spray gun.

Bailey takes his dog, Molly, on a daily afternoon hike through the hills surrounding Port Costa.

Cork-shooter made from a car-wash tool and walnut.

Bailey loads a propane-powered cannon that is capable of launching tennis balls several hundred feet. His dog, Molly, generally approves of this.

Cork-shooter made from a vintage drill.

Betty Bailey mimics her husband's body language as she jokes with him during an afternoon snack in their kitchen.

Potato-shooter made from a spray gun.

Bailey walks through his backyard with a rake, tidying up the fallen foliage.

Cork-shooter made from a carbonated-water bottle and a power tool.

PORT COSTA, California — The first thing you’ll notice upon entering Clayton Bailey’s workshop is the man and his mustache. The ends of his majestic facial hair curl down either side of his mouth and don’t stop until they’re well down his chest.

Next you’ll notice the many steampunkish ray guns — from dueling pistols to rifles to turrets — that Bailey has constructed from materials he found at flea markets and scrap yards around the San Francisco Bay Area. Instead of shooting lasers, they utilize either lungpower or pump-action air pressure to launch peas, corks or bits of potato a third of the way down a football field.

Bailey’s workshop also holds plenty of heavy machinery, which for the uninitiated might seem a hazard to Bailey’s magnificent mustache. But he isn’t the type of man to lose his facial hair in a lathe. He’s a deliberate and graceful type, and besides, as an artist, he’s been firing kilns and slicing through brass tubing for the better part of half a century.

Yet Bailey’s ray guns, which fetch prices between $500 and $1,500, rarely require something as intensive as soldering or welding. This is pure, simple, ingenious assemblage. He starts by picking a handle from an aging tool — a 60-year-old drill, for instance — and, using nothing more than tubing, rivets, screws, nuts, bolts and a few secret ingredients, he pieces together a futuristic pop gun capable of firing a projectile up to 100 feet. If he has the right parts, Bailey can assemble one and polish it in as little as three hours. Others take months to come together.

“I like the flexibility,” says Bailey, who recently retired after spending nearly 30 years teaching art at California State University, Hayward. To stay sharp, he subscribes to Make magazine; to stay old-school, he consults schematics in Popular Mechanics issues from the early 1900s. “If you put something together with a screw or a nut and bolt, you can take it apart to fix it. And I find that often very handy, to have removable machinery.” Indeed, in the unlikely event that any of Bailey’s ray guns stop working for an art collector, the owner can send the item back to the artist for a free repair.

As we’re talking, Bailey grabs one of his lung-powered ray guns, steps out of his workshop, and piles some peas into his mouth.

“See the dog up there?” he mumbles while aiming at an elderly pooch lounging on the deck. He inhales and fires a volley of peas down the barrel toward the creature, which doesn’t seem to mind. “The cats usually run when they hear it.”

Bailey, by the way, is a self-described “joker” and “a science and technology enthusiast, but without knowing so much about it.” You wouldn’t figure it from his sci-fi arsenal and the army of human-size, found-object robots that staff his studio. Bailey’s decidedly less futuristic offerings, his pop rifles, are stashed in a gun case near his desk. For the rifle’s butt he’ll spend several days hand-carving a piece of tiger maple procured from eBay or a two-by-four from a locust tree that once stood down the road. The result is a weighty, sturdy, dashing work of ballistic art.

And the inner workings of the ray guns? “Every steampunker in the world will be able to make his own gun if I tell you the secret,” Bailey says. “And I don’t know if I like that.”

There’s no arguing with a man as elegantly mustachioed as Clayton Bailey.